Got back from roadtrip, developed film, scanned film, still editing / working on project.

Snow started falling Jake and I started to take advantage of snow with the snow sports.  I started to shoot the sequel to Colonized Waterways, and then I broke my knee.

5 months and 6 sheets of 4×5 later I was back on my feet (actually foot) in P.T. and am now back on the road.  I’ve spent the last two weeks in a combo of DC and NYC and next week head off to the (northern part) of the south.  I will be spending the next two months living with Sarah on the road.  So I was planning on showing allot of things.  Then I realized that most of those projects were one off’s.  Essays in the grand photojournalist tradition.  Here is a list of everything new for you to look at.  I’m not going to waste time and look for comments on whats done.

(In chronological order)

Capitol Thoughts

Tax Payer March On Washington

Sister(ongoing)

Grandparents

Restoring Honor

As you can see I have a shit ton of eggs in differing baskets.  I have this “family” project, which is unyieldingly straight forward.  A political “project” which I have been starting to get seriously interested in with thoughts of shooting actual government, and also photographing more extremist political things.  There is also the twice westward project which I will be shooting for during these two months with Sarah, also our underwear work will be getting done.  And then when I’m home I will get back to shooting the river.  Which I may post soon?  I will probably wait till I’m back in Oregon and actively working on it.

so guess what?  I guess I’m a photojournalist.  Being that all I do is essays.  Meh “Art” needs institutional designation for definition so I guess I would rather be a rogue journalist with no ethics?

anyway no more talk.  Here are the “good” pictures I took with a view camera and a broken knee.  What’s that?  Oh yeah I’m a hardcore mother fucker.

Father arrives home with new plants.

Mother does the annual washing of the outdoor art.

Dogs thinking that someone has come home early.

Dogs sleeping on my laundry.

Dog snot on the carpet.

Batteries from PS3 controller rolled off table in the afternoon.

So yeah.  A couple things you will notice / not see.  I’m not going to post anything finished on here anymore.  Everything will be crude.  You want finished go look at my website.

I am super unsure about these pictures.  This stuff is way out of my comfort zone.  They are exceedingly quiet and autobiographical.  I’m not much one for diaries (although I constantly photograph my dogs).

Speaking of which I wish my dog pictures were as good as Tony Mendoza’s.

GO!

As with allot of the parts of seeing my family along my route is to document their life as it pertains to me.  With this I see my future and parts of my present.  Being here has been nice and a bit strange, I need to spend more time with these photographs.

Poppy waiting at the optometrists office for some ointment.

Going to the clinic is quite convenient being that in the community doctors seem to locate them around patients who are concentrated so much around the elderly.The ceiling fixture in their house was really ugly, it’s good that they replaced it.  The company that replaced the fixture was mostly staffed by immigrants.  Poppy being an immigrant loves to talk about how hard they work compared to my generation of kids of “entitlement” who will “never work a real day in our lives.”  The immigrant experience is the cornerstone of his criticism of me.Birdy and Poppy like to pool walk, it’s a social thing they say.  They have a routine where they usually go in at a certain time and they befriend each other.  When I arrived they wanted to pool walk and I got there rather late in the day so there was a completely different crowd and kids.  They love to complain about how much they don’t like the noise kids make.  It’s funny how not typically old they usually are then they drop something like that.  Oh those damn noisy kids and their noise.  I think it’s because they now surround themselves with other old people.

Poppy being from the Czechoslovokia ( when there was still such a thing) has a fondness for things that slightly remind him of Europe.  He loves IKEA breakfast and IKEA in general.  They needed a knife to cut meat.  I recommended a flat blade rather than a curved one.Poppy reads the newspaper.  He actually reads six or seven in many languages.  He reads most of them on the computer.  It’s funny because Birdy really doesn’t read the paper anymore.  But she watches the news and complains about the lack of news on there.  Those can be fun arguments when we get into that.

Poppy driving his golf cart back from the dealership.  He claims it makes a noise.  I could not hear it.

Poppy and Birdy cover the plants when it freezes.  That doesn’t happen often in Arizona.  Birdy is the green thumb of the two but Poppy has the final say in the design of the garden.  He’s stern like that.

Poppy likes to make work for himself.  Closing the blinds at night is one of his self assigned jobs.

Poppy dealing with a man from the neighborhood assosciation.

Birdy looking at chotchsky’s in the backyard of an estate sale.  Those are really creepy, the clothes left in the closet and stuff splayed all over the place.  They have friends that have furnished their houses only from estate sales.  Strange form of recycling.  And frugality.

You want to go somewhere swingin on a friday night.  Go to the elks lodge.  That evening it was all retired/elderly folks.  While I was taking this picture a woman came up to me and said we got to talking about what I was photographing.  She started to complain about her grand kids not coming to visit.  I told her she was to young to have such progeny  and she responded “I’m not young.  I am old!  And I am having fun!”.Rearranging the antiques after the installation of the new light fixture in the kitchen.  Poppy likes everything just so so he took pictures of how things were arranged before the work was done.  Poppy stood by yelling at grandma to make sure all the items were placed at pleasing angles.  It was funny, they act just like the honeymooners yelling sarcastically with the immediacy of two people hard of hearing.

Poppy learned spanish when he was stationed in south america during WWII.  He was an engineer so he saw no active combat but made maps.  He keeps up spanish through Destinos a kind of soap operah meant to teach spanish.  I went through that in high school.  It was fun.Rabbit in the front lawn.  Birdy didn’t believe me when I told her that it was there.  During the winter they hide apparently because the birds of pray fly down from the mountains.

I keep having conversations about how americans feel so entitled and whatnot with Poppy.  I say that the greatest sign of american decadence is the fact that people live in the desert.  Where they should not be.  I think one thing about his immigrant narrative is the duality that he likes what American Values are but wants to claim no part of it due to how he finds many of its side effects disagreeable.  Instead of bucking up to the consequences of the lifestyle they’ve chosen.

Poppy love to use his go-kart, ez go I think it’s called.  They go to all the activities in their kart.

We played mini-golf.  I won.  Birdy was close, Poppy made the maximum stroke amount except for three wholes where he achieved a whole in one.

Poppy and Birdy learned CPR.  It was really odd to watch.  The questions people asked were also super depressing.

thoughts?

So upon certain requests and thoughts about the last post I have tried to internalize the comments and try a couple of directions.  Sadly no underpants, for a few reasons.  First almost got arrested.  Well that is mostly it.  I do not want to get banned from places that I would like to go back to.  So as a few of you know I have been on the road three months or so on my way back west.  I have continued to shoot for twice westward but with film ( I have a trash bag full of it in my car) so there is nothing form that part.  I have been making more self portraits as a tourist while making my more “critical” (?) photographs.  I want to take pictures with other groups of tourists only problem is it’s winter in most places and it’s also the middle of the non-vacation season so I have been 95% alone and about 5% rejected.  I’m going to continue to work on that.  I really don’t know where these are going, they are facebook/myspace pictures for the most part.  But is that appropriate?

Something Greg said about performance really got me on a roll thinking about performance and street photography.  While looking at my own photographs and those of much better street photographers (winogrand, epstein, mercure) I have come to think that when not dealing with pure aesthetics the nature of the “the moment” is hugely performative.  The context of which subject is performing and what performance is I think needs further analysis. Calculated actions simulating experience.  What/who is performing in the context of tourism is very ambiguous.  Baudrillard really hits on this thought with controlled environment i.e. nature trails parks, statues, museums, etc. creating certain responses.  What I feel that I am attracted to in my photographs are these points of simulation or performance.  I feel that Tammy Mercure’s work with tourist traps and tourists is a good reference point.  Or even Sage Sohiers “perfect-able worlds”.  What I am photographing are objects that are simulations and reactions / interactions that are created in these situations.

So I’ll say it again thoughts?

(those who aren’t familiar can check out my nifty website with oversized jpgs (i need to fix that))

So I have been on the road since the summer at RIT.  I have been continuing my twice westward project which is a vague interpretation of my own status as a tourist.  That newer stuff will be seen eventually when I have a chance to look at it.

I understand that in any “art” the self (from a production standpoint) is deep inside the object, in the choice, influence, selection, narrative, etc, etc.  But that self is part of the macro vision of the photographer rather than the micro.  What I mean by that is that the westward stuff in the “self” pushed out on the world rather than the world pushed in on the self.  All of my travel and relatively self-indulgent concern with my own vision has had certain consequences on my personal life.

At 22 I have spent four years in a monogamous relationship, and in those four years I have spent over one of those traveling, being an absentee.  I started to miss the small routine we had built of getting dressed together in the morning.  There was a certain knowledge of a person (and an intimacy), so I asked her to send me a photograph of her every day.  Well of the underwear she was wearing, and I said I would do the same.  S had one idea about the photographs, and I seemed to have another.  Every time I stayed somewhere that wasn’t my car I photographed myself in my underpants.

I feel that this work is in compliment to the work from my twice westward project http://mikefuchs.net/index.php?/projects/twice-westward/  and I have been trying to figure out a way to integrate these images or at least this set of ideas into that work.  I have yet to find a successful means to do this.  From a conceptual standpoint they bring the actual circumstance of “me” into the situation much like how Friedlander and in some ways Shore did the same in their roa-dtrip work by photographing their circumstances.   The only strategies I can think of are in a purely display kind, wherein these images would be displayed with the twice westward work if it were seen in a space.  I feel that the idea fits but the images don’t integrate.  I guess the other question would be why do they have to?  Why can’t they exist along with the more traditional modernist street practice to show the dichotomy?  I don’t know if that can really be successful.

As I continued traveling I decided to try and bring S into the situation.  Out of that came something.  I really don’t know where these photographs are going but I feel that these are becoming part of my understanding of how the micro and the macro of my situations fit together.  I don’t know if that makes sense or is a good thing.

and lastly this is a new direction in this project which are videos of S and I enacting part of the ritual that these photographs embody, or maybe aspect is a better word.

[vimeo 7563531 480px 380px]

Completely difference trajectory I know.  But what do people think?

I do not know if this is the right venue for this comment, but I wanted to offer some thoughts on how I intend to use this site and the kind of thoughts I want from you other users.  As for my own sanity I will do so in a efficient and probably curt manner that those who know me are used to.

What I’m Interested in:

Your thought’s.

What you see in the work’s trajectory.

Ideas about how you think the work could be shaped and improved.

What I’m not interested in:

I’m not particularly interested in which photographs you “like”.  Like is a dismissive term.

I’m not interested in how I should crop or re-shoot.

Also I wills say that I am not going to be posting any “finished” work or projects here.  Only things in progress, that need help, that need you, my community of peers.

So give me some criticism.  Be as mean as you like.  You know I like it like that.